Geek Answers: How many alien (human) artifacts are on the moon?

If you write online and publish your email address on your Twitter account, you get some weird email. This is a principle of the internet, well known by now, but some might not know the tenor of the emails you receive, the topics, the favorite bugaboos. Without a doubt, space is the king; I get emails from people upset about missed alien sightings and enormous NASA coverups, and one particularly insistent man who has irrefutable evidence of thermonuclear explosions on Mars. But probably the most common email type is the alien artifact alert, the messages from hawk-eyed photo experts who’ve spied an alien ship — or skull, or shield generator, or teapot — covered in lens flare or moon dust. These emails are always particularly annoying to me, since they are no unnecessary. There are plenty of real alien artifacts in space — we’re just the ones who put them there.

NASA has published a great pictorial guide to the placement of human artifacts on the moon, technology we’ve left behind after our now-frequent visits. Some of the dots on the map below are simple wreckage, some defunct rovers, some national parks, but the most interesting are the working rovers. These photos are accurate as of a couple of years ago, leaving out some important info. Take a look though, and we’ll recap below — be sure to click for a high-res version.

Public conception of moon missions tends to end with Apollo 11 — or maybe Apollo 13 — and while it’s true that the urgency of moon science waned after that point, the majority of the stuff that’s actually on the Moon was launched after 1970. The launch record for early moon missions was, let’s just say, gory, to the point that it’s difficult to imagine the modern public standing for so many public, expensive test failures. A lot of these missions were planned and tested behind closed doors, but a lot of them weren’t. Failures came on both sides of the iron curtain, though, and successes tended to be in lock step; America and the Soviet Union each landed a probe safely on the moon in the same year, and they were neck and neck in launching a working lunar orbiter.

Oof…

In more recent decades, though, Russia has had to turn its focus inward, and America has turned its sights towards the red planet, or even asteroids and comets. The Moon, in recent years, has been the domain of the up-and-coming space programs, particularly those from China, India, and Japan. You’ll notice that there’s only a single yellow dot on the map above; that’s because the info is slightly too old to include a dot for Yutu, China’s ill-fated rover, or the craft it landed on. There’s also (oddly) a legend entry for India but no Indian technology shown. China, India, even Luxembourgian aerospace companies are taking an interest in the Moon.

The artifacts we leave there are varied — the above picture shows you the layout of our archaeological littering, but this document (pdf) shows the full compliment of detritus we’ve actually left. It’s not just full landers — we’ve dropped everything from landing struts to construction spanners, and violently smashed a good deal of technology into the surface. We don’t know the full distribution of stuff, since we can’t account for every little bit of shrapnel which can fly very far indeed under lunar gravity.

Pretty soon, the frequency of human visits to the Moon will wash out the importance of all but a few sites. Laugh all you want at the practicality of it, we may look back at the effort to protect the Apollo 11 landing site as prophetic, when we’re listening to stories about the site’s destruction. Space tourism and, more to the point, space industry could easily end up erasing the transient historical imprints of our first steps out of the nest.